Vikrant Rona has a plot out of a storybook for older kids – if you ignore the numerous hangings and horror film-style jump scares.
This movie likes to dangle bodies, even those of children, from the nearest available branch. It’s dark, literally so. Vikrant Rona plays out in the fictional Kamarottu village in an era where Hema Malini is already a star but electricity is in short supply. A series of murders, including that of a police inspector, brings the titular hero to Kamarottu.
Vikrant (Sudeep) walks into a domestic drama playing out at the household of the landlord Janardhan (Madhusudan Rao). Janardhan’s estranged son Sanju (Nirup Bhandari) has suddenly returned. Sanju has fallen for Aparna (Neetha Ashok), who is meant to marry someone else. Vikrant’s predecessor at the police station has left behind a series of unsolved clues. A smuggler is hard at work in the jungle nearby.
Kamarottu was also the site of writer-director Anup Bhandari’s debut feature RangiTaranga (2015). In Vikrant Rona, which was filmed in Kannada and has been dubbed into Hindi, Kamarottu is a portal into past and present crimes.
Somewhere in the underlit houses with cellars lies the key to the mystery behind the dangling corpses. Until the interval point, Bhandari does a decent job of maintaining suspense about the motives of various characters, including Vikrant himself.
But the post-interval section falls inexorably down the well in which one of the corpses has been found. The disjointed narrative staggers from one idea to the next just like Vikrant magically appears and disappears at will. The tone wildly shifts from broad comedy to crime thriller to horror.
The spatial relation of characters to one another is poorly defined too. The forest appears to be no more than a large clump of trees that would have happily yielded their secrets in the daytime. The visual effects team does a competent job of rolling out the fog and lengthening the shadows. But unlike a nicely executed one-take action sequence, the 147-minute film is in too much of a rush to make its convoluted plot credible.
The characters include a stereotyped Muslim who hasn’t heard of birth control and a victim of caste discrimination who doesn’t get the hearing he deserves. Jacqueline Fernandez has a cameo as a bar dancer who pants after Vikrant.
One of the male characters spends the entire film in alarmingly short shorts. Focused on creating a visually evocative setting and showcasing leading man Sudeep’s cool moves, Vikrant Rona is happy to miss the wood for the trees.
